WoW – More fun together!

An Experiment

This weekend, Reversion and I are going to try an experiment. We’ll get on our tank and heals and stand in Trade spamming for three dps with GearScore *below* 4k. Maybe 4.2k if we can’t find any lower than that. They need to be willing to take constructive criticism though; we’ve both played enough classes that we can spot really wrong things pretty quickly.

Then we’ll run some instances, and see what we can see. Gear != skill. However, a high gear score says you have ground out X number of instances or raids, and therefore should be able to play your class well. This doesn’t actually see to be true, based on all the 5k gear score doing 2k dps we run into all the time.

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My wife and I also level various alts as tank-healer combos and our levelling experience is as follows:

Players play significantly better and use a lot more different abilities when 3-manning an instance than with a full group. In fact, we never do dungeons with more than 4 players (preferably 3) when levelling these days.

Some encounters offer special challenges for 3-man groups because two of the players can be CCed at the same time (Zul ‘Farrak for example), or because of the number of mobs in a trash pull. Fun stuff.

One caveat. I feed the group with elixirs, potions, and buff food to give us a better chance.

Do you find the time trade-off to be worth it? With Dungeon Finder available to port you into and out of dungeons, I’d suffer through a few bad players just for that.

An interesting correlary Reversion and I have noticed is group quests. If it says “3 players”, two players who know their classes and are careful can do it no problem. If it says “5 players”, you need someone tank specced and someone with big heals, but two players can manage if they don’t get unlucky. It just takes a while longer. We did the Dragonblight group quests with our druid and pally alts the other day. Had no trouble with any of them, admittedly we were two levels higher than the elite mobs we were killing.

I hearth and spam the trade channel offering 25 gold for players in level range X – Y to join our group for queueing purposes and leave as soon as we enter the dungeon. It usually takes less than 5 minutes to 2 people to respond.

I am not sure how it compares to how long “normal” queues are, but spending 5 minutes in Ironforge, even if distracted, means I can take care of my mail and my auctions.

Dungeons do take longer with only 3 players but I don’t know whether the XP / hour is much worse than running dungeons with a full group because the XP is only divided between 3 players. But that’s only if we have not disabled experience gains. We do it a number of times on our way to 80 to ensure we will be able to complete each dungeon at least once when end bosses are yellow or orange to us.

Please note a challenging journey to 80 is what we want for our alts and the time it takes to get there is not relevant. How much action our alts see after dinging 80 depends on how much we enjoy playing them. In no way do we try to gear them up with emblem gear.